Teaching

Faculty librarians teach skills and concepts essential for academic success, including information literacy, primary source literacy, and related technologies. Our instruction may take the form of full-term, for-credit courses; stand-alone workshops; or customized sessions integrated into other courses.

Library Instruction Request Form: Request a library instruction session for your course.

Information Literacy

Information literacy is the set of concepts, practices, and dispositions necessary to engage information both meaningfully and efficiently.  As such, it is critical to any project in which finding, evaluating, and using information is required.

Information literacy is not just instruction in how to operate various information technologies; rather, it refers to fluency with a broader information environment of which such technology is an important part.

Information literacy promotes awareness of the variety of contexts (technological, rhetorical, social, cultural, economic, and legal) which condition the creation, access, distribution, and use of knowledge.

Monroe Library’s Teaching & Learning Team sees information literacy as more than a set of discrete skills and draws upon the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) to shape our instruction program.

In turn, the library instruction program supports the Loyola Core Competencies, which expressly include information literacy.  It also fosters the university’s Jesuit values, which prioritize critical thought.  By teaching information literacy within the major programs, as well as in the Core, we also support SACS Accreditation Standard 3.8.2, which states that “The institution ensures that users have access to regular and timely instruction in the use of the library and other learning/information resources.”

Primary Source Literacy

Monroe Library librarians and archivists also have a special interest in promoting primary source literacy and providing learning experiences to students across the curriculum. We seek to engage learners with primary sources in all formats, including unique materials from our Special Collections & Archives and at partner institutions in New Orleans, digital collections in the Louisiana Digital Library and other online repositories, as well as more widely distributed formats such as newspapers, datasets, creative works, and other records of the human experience.

Primary sources are materials in a variety of formats that serve as original evidence documenting a time period, an event, a work, people, or ideas. Primary source literacy is the combination of knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, and ethically use primary sources within specific disciplinary contexts, in order to create new knowledge or to revise existing understandings. (Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy, SAA-ACRL/RBMS Joint Task Force on Primary Source Literacy, 2018)

Technology Instruction

The Teaching & Learning Team recognizes a range of approaches to use when teaching technology.  Whether for students, staff, or faculty, self-directed tutorials are frequently an ideal orientation to a new tool.  Monroe Library collects and creates such tutorials, making them available through its learning objects repository Wolf-LOR and on its digital scholarship guides. These tutorials are often demonstrations of key functions of a specific software.  

Learning how to apply such tools in a critical way usually requires a different sort of approach -- one which features active, reflective, and collaborative learning.  We design this type of instruction in a variety of formats, and we tend less to stress a particular tool or software than we do a related literacy (i.e. data or media literacy), or metaliteracy.

As with information literacy instruction, technology instruction may be mapped to target courses and specific learning objectives, particularly when it is considered essential to the program’s field.